famine, affluence, and morality · affluence, and morality.” the propor-tion of the world’s...

F a m i n e,aFFluence,and

morality

F a m i n e,aFFluence,andmorality

Peter Singer

1

1Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New YorkAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City NairobiNew Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices inArgentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France GreeceGuatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal SingaporeSouth Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Peter Singer 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSinger, Peter, 1946- author.Famine, affluence, and morality / Peter Singer.pages cmIncludes index.ISBN 978-0-19-021920-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Humanitarianism. 2. Famines—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Poverty—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Suffering—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Wealth—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. BJ1475.3.S56 2015170—dc23 2015005676

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Miller Text FontPrinted in the United States of America on acid-free paper

contents

Fo r e w o r d—Bill and Melinda Gates vii

P r e Fa c e—Peter Singer ix

a c k n o w l e d g m e n ts xxxi

Fa m i n e , a F F lu e n c e , a n d m o r a l i t y 1

t h e s i n g e r s o lu t i o n t o w o r l d P o v e rt y 33

w h at s h o u l d a B i l l i o n a i r e g i v e —

a n d w h at s h o u l d y o u ? 51

Forew ord

vii

t he world has improved dramatically in

the more than forty years that have

passed since Singer wrote “Famine,

Affluence, and Morality.” The propor-

tion of the world’s population living in ex-

treme poverty today is less than half what it was

then, and the proportion of children who die

before their fifth birthday has plunged even

more. In 1960, almost 20 percent of the world’s

children died before their fifth birthday. By

1990, it was around 10 percent, and now it’s

closer to 5 percent.

But 5 percent is still too many—on the

order of 6.3 million child deaths a year. Most

of these deaths are the result of conditions

viii · F o r e w o r d

like diarrhea, pneumonia, or malaria that we

know how to prevent or cure. Nevertheless,

the reduction in child deaths is encouraging.

It shows that aid does work and refutes the

damaging myth that foreign aid does no good.

Singer’s work argues that we can work

together to prevent very bad things from

happening—like the deaths of children. The

evidence for this claim is much stronger now

than it was in 1972. Fortunately, more and

more people are seeing that this is the case,

and many of them are also taking action. You

might suggest that Singer’s article was ahead

of its time when it was originally published.

But perhaps it’s time has now come.

—Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs,

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

“Famine, Affluence, and Morality”

was written at the height of the

refugee crisis brought about by

military repression in what was

then East Pakistan. Nine million people fled

across the border into India, where they strug-

gled to survive in refugee camps. With the ben-

efit of hindsight, we can see the crisis as a

pivotal stage in the emergence of Bangladesh

as an independent nation, but at the time that

fortunate outcome seemed improbable, whereas

the immense number of people in peril was ap-

parent. I used the dire emergency as a spring-

board for my argument that people in affluent

nations should be doing much more to help

ix

PreFace

x · P r e Fa c e

people in great need in much poorer parts of

the world, but that argument is quite general in

its application, and the challenge it presents re-

mains as confronting today as it was in 1971.

Ethics and political philosophy were then

on the verge of an exciting new transforma-

tion. For the previous twenty-five years moral

philosophy had focused on analyzing the mean-

ings of moral terms like “good” and “ought”

and this was assumed to have no implications

for substantive questions about how we ought

to live. A. J. Ayer wrote that it is a mistake to

look to moral philosophers for guidance and

Peter Laslett seemed to be summing up a

widespread view with his oft-quoted line: “For

the moment, anyway, political philosophy is

dead.”1 That “moment” lasted until the student

protest movement of the 1960s demanded

courses that were relevant to the major issues

of the day: civil rights, racial discrimination,

1 A. J. Ayer, “The Analysis of Moral Judgment” in A. J. Ayer, Philosophical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1954). Around the time I was writing “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” I wrote a brief note critical of this view of the subject, published as “Moral Experts,” Analysis, 32 (1972): 115–17. Peter Laslett’s remark is from his introduction to his edited volume, Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956).

P r e Fa c e · xi

the war in Vietnam, and civil disobedience.

Then some philosophers recalled that their

tradition had, in previous eras, had a lot to say

about these topics. The launch of a new journal

Philosophy & Public Affairs was announced

with a “Statement of Purpose” proclaiming that

a philosophical examination of issues of public

concern “can contribute to their clarification

and their resolution.” (Today, it is hard to be-

lieve that a statement so cautiously phrased

could be regarded as radical.) Thus began, or

rather was revived, the field now known as

“practical” or “applied” ethics.

When the soon-to-be-launched journal began

inviting the submission of papers, I was a re-

cent Oxford graduate, just starting my first aca-

demic position. Already as an undergraduate

in Australia I had been involved in the abor-

tion law reform movement and the opposition

to the war in Vietnam. At Oxford I had written

my thesis on the basis of the obligation to obey

the law in a democracy.2 My wife and I were

donating 10 percent of our income to Oxfam

2 The thesis became the basis for my first book, Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

xii · P r e Fa c e

and had recently become vegetarian, after learn-

ing about how animals are treated before being

turned into meat.3 I was eager to tackle, in a

philosophical way, the important ethical ques-

tions that I faced in my own life. The launch of

Philosophy & Public Affairs provided the per-

fect opportunity to do so. “Famine, Affluence,

and Morality” appeared in spring 1972, in the

third issue of the first volume.

The article soon became a staple of courses

in ethics. An incomplete list of anthologies in

which it has been reprinted runs to fifty. Each

year it is read by thousands of undergraduates

and high school students in many different

countries. Yet until recently, it was probably

more often used to pose an intellectual puzzle

rather than to challenge students to consider if

they are living ethically. Professors presented

it by saying: “Here is an article with an argu-

ment that seems to be sound, but the conclu-

sion is impossibly demanding. Find the flaw in

the argument.” Over the past decade, however,

3 I presented this argument in my second book, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review/Random House, 1975).

P r e Fa c e · xiii

more and more students, and at least some

of their professors, took a different stance.

They found no flaw in the argument and were

keen to explore its ethical implications.4 The

emerging new movement known as Effective

Altruism includes many people who have been

influenced by the essay, or by the other writ-

ings in this book, to change their lives.5 Here

are a few examples:

• TobyOrdreadtheessaywhenhewasaphi-

losophy student. He went on to found Giving

What We Can, which encourages people to pledge

to give 10 percent of their pre-tax income, until

retirement, to the charities that they believe

will do the most good. Members of Giving What

We Can have, at the time of writing, donated

over £8 million and the pledges already made

4 Joshua Greene described this shift in the approach taken to the article when introducing me prior to a talk I gave at Harvard University in April 2015 on behalf of Harvard Effective Altruism. Greene, who had been an undergraduate at Harvard, contrasted the approach his professor took to the article with that of the students who had organized the talk and those who had filled the large lecture theater to hear it.

5 See Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), and William MacAskill, Doing Good Better (New York: Gotham Books, 2015).

xiv · P r e Fa c e

commit them to donating an estimated £457

million over their lifetimes.

• ChrisCroywasassigned“Famine,Affluence,

and Morality” for a class he took at St. Louis

Community College, in Meramec, Missouri. The

class also read an opposing essay in which the

philosopher John Arthur argued that if my

argument were sound, it would follow that we

should also aid others by giving parts of our

bodies, such as a kidney. Arthur held that this

can’t be right: the fact that more good will come

from such a donation is not enough, he thought,

to show that we ought to do it. To Croy, that

seemed more like an argument for donating a

kidney than against giving to people in extreme

poverty. After thinking hard about it, and dis-

cussing it with a friend, he called a local hospital,

and subsequently donated one of his kidneys to

a stranger (who turned out to be a 43-year-old

schoolteacher working at a school that serves

mostly poor children).

• GustavAlexandrie,aSwedishcomposer,was

influenced by my writings to give to organiza-

P r e Fa c e · xv

tions helping the world’s poorest people. He

wanted to help spread the idea that he consid-

ered so important, and decided to use his own

particular expertise to do so. He wrote a piece of

choral music in which the choir sings about the

central analogy of the article, the child drown-

ing in the shallow pond. Alexandrie’s composi-

tion was premiered in Stockholm in 2014 by the

Södra Latin Chamber Choir, conducted by Jan

Risberg.

• DeanSpearscompletedhisPhDineconomics

in 2013. A few years earlier, he and his wife Diane

Coffey, also studying for her doctorate at

Princeton, had started an organization in India

called Research Institute for Compassionate

Economics or r.i.c.e (www.riceinstitute.org). After

graduation, Dean made r.i.c.e.’s work his full-time

job. As he put it in an email to me, his decision

was “due to a process that largely started with

‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality.’ ” The argu-

ment of that article was, however, importantly

bolstered by Diane’s longstanding commit-

ment to a career of service to the poor. Dean

http://www.riceinstitute.org

xvi · P r e Fa c e

and Diane now live in India and are focusing on

the issue of open defecation, a problem that has

been unduly neglected, perhaps because it seems

embarrassing to discuss, but has a very severe im-

pact on the health of young children, with conse-

quences that can blight their adult lives as well.

I’m pleased, of course, that my article could have

led to Dean and Diane doing such important

work. My favorite part of Dean’s message, how-

ever, was a footnote saying: “We read from the

pond story at our wedding.”

• In January 2015, while I was writing this

preface, I received an email from David Bernard,

an undergraduate at Uppsala University, in

Sweden, inviting me to speak at his university at

a meeting to be arranged by the newly formed

group Effective Altruism Uppsala. David then

added a personal note: “ ‘Famine, Affluence, and

Morality’ was the first step on my path to dis-

covering effective altruism. . . . Your writings have

helped me immensely in taking concrete actions

to fulfil the vague desire I had to do good and

have helped give my life much more meaning.”

P r e Fa c e · xvii

Now it’s your turn to read “Famine, Affluence,

and Morality.” Perhaps it will change your life

too. If you find it persuasive, please think about

how you can help to spread its central idea.

◊

“Famine, Affluence, and Morality” has had its

fair share of objections and counter- arguments—

or perhaps rather more than its fair share, be-

cause it leads to the uncomfortable conclusion

that very few of us are living fully ethical lives.

One point on which a correction is needed

relates to the estimated cost of saving a life by

donating to a charity. The analogy between

saving the child in the pond and saving the life

of a child in a developing country dying from

poverty-related causes implies that, for the

cost of replacing one’s muddy clothes one can

save a life. In the second essay reprinted here,

“The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” I refer

to Peter Unger’s rough calculation that you

can save a life for $200. In other places—

among them, “What Should a Billionaire

xviii · P r e Fa c e

Give—and What Should You?,” which is also

reprinted in this volume—I have imagined that

wading into the pond to save the child will ruin

your shoes, and that for the cost of an expen-

sive pair of shoes, you could save a child’s life.

One very welcome development in phi-

lanthropy since the publication of “Famine,

Affluence, and Morality” is that today there

is much more emphasis on evaluating what

charities seeking to help the global poor actu-

ally achieve. A great deal of research has been

done into the effectiveness of particular chari-

ties, enabling people to make better charitable

choices and thus to do more good with the

money that they donate. This research has

shown that many early estimates of the cost of

saving a life did not include all the costs in-

volved, or were based on inaccurate estimates

of how often a form of aid such as providing

bednets to protect people against malaria

actually saved a life.6 GiveWell, which has led

6 For a critique of the pond analogy on these grounds, see Jonah Sinick, “Some Reservations About Singer’s Child-in-the-Pond Argument,” at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hr5/some_reservations_about_singers_childinthepond/, accessed August 9, 2015.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hr5/some_reservations_about_singers_childinthepond/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hr5/some_reservations_about_singers_childinthepond/

P r e Fa c e · xix

the way in rigorously evaluating the cost-

effectiveness of charities, estimates that al-

though it costs the Against Malaria Foundation

no more than $7.50 to provide and deliver a

bednet to a family in a malaria-prone region of

Africa, the cost of a life saved as a result of this

distribution is $3,340. The difference reflects

the fact that most bednets do not save lives

(although some of them prevent debilitating

but not fatal cases of malaria, as well as other

diseases carried by mosquitoes). In general,

GiveWell considers a cost of less than $5,000

per life saved an indication that a charity is

highly cost-effective.7 That figure is, for most

of us, much more than the cost of our most

expensive suit or shoes, so it was a mistake to

compare that cost with what we would need to

spend in order to save the life of a child at risk

from poverty-related causes. It remains true,

though, that most people who are middle class

7 http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/amf. GiveWell considers anything under $5,000 per life saved to be good value, though the organization also cautions against taking such estimates too literally. For further discussion see http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/cost-effectiveness.

http://www.givewell.org/International/top-charities/amf

http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/cost-effectiveness

http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/cost-effectiveness

xx · P r e Fa c e

or above in affluent countries spend much

more than $5,000 on items that are not of

comparable moral significance to saving a life.

Moreover as Unger has shown with his story

of Bob and the Bugatti, which I retell in “The

Singer Solution to World Poverty,” our intuitive

judgment in situations where we can save a child

in front of us is that we should be prepared to

sacrifice possessions worth much more than

our clothes, and even more than $5,000. The

change in the cost of saving a life does not,

therefore, undermine the fundamental moral

argument of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”

I reply to some other objections in the two

New York Times articles that are included in

this volume, and further responses can be found

in Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.

Others have also defended the original argu-

ment; indeed there is now a considerable aca-

demic literature on the topic.8 Rather than

8 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save (New York: Random House, 2009). For those wishing to pursue the current academic literature on the argument of “Famine Affluence, and Morality,” a good place to start is Patricia Illingworth, Thomas Pogge, and Leif Wenar, eds., Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy

P r e Fa c e · xxi

go into this debate more deeply here, however,

I want instead to broaden the discussion by

mentioning some recent psychological research

that helps us to understand why we respond as

we do to the story of the child in the pond.

◊

Joshua Greene directs the Moral Cognition

Lab in Harvard University’s Department of

Psychology, but before going into psychology

he got a PhD in philosophy at Princeton

University, so he knew all about the challenge

posed by the example of the child in the pond.

He was well aware of the difficulty of condemn-

ing a failure to aid the drowning child near

to you while permitting a failure to aid the

starving child far from you, and yet he knew

that almost everyone intuitively judges the two

cases very differently. He wanted to know why.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially Elizabeth Ashford, “Obligations of Justice and Beneficence to Aid the Severely Poor,” pp. 26–45, and Leif Wenar, “Poverty Is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent,” pp. 104–32. For a response to the essay by Wenar, see Theron Pummer, “Risky Giving,” at http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/01/risky-giving/, accessed January 13, 2015.

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/01/risky-giving/

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/01/risky-giving/

xxii · P r e Fa c e

As I originally presented the example, there

are several potentially significant differences

between the two situations. The child in the

pond is near to you, and presumably a member

of your own community, whereas the starving

child is far away, and a foreigner. A child falling

into a pond is a rare emergency, whereas global

poverty is an ongoing problem. There is just

one, identifiable child in the pond needing

to be rescued, and you can save that child,

whereas there are millions of impoverished

children dying from poverty-related causes

each year, and you can’t save them all, or even

identify a particular child who will die if you

do not help. You are the only one who can save

the child in the pond, but any moderately af-

fluent person can help children in poverty, so

the responsibility for saving those children is

diffused in a way that the responsibility for

saving the child in the pond is not. And in the

pond case you can see for yourself that your

action is very likely to save a life, whereas when

you donate to an aid organization you have to

rely on information gathered by someone else

P r e Fa c e · xxiii

about the likely impact of your donation. Is

the difference in our intuitive judgments

based more heavily on some of these factors

than others? If we can answer that question,

the answer may tell us something about the

reliability of our intuitive judgments.

Greene worked with Jay Musen, a student,

to test people’s responses to various imaginary

scenarios. The factor that had the biggest effect

by far turned out to be the physical distance

between the child and the person who could

help. In one of the scenarios, you are vacation-

ing in a developing country when it is hit by a

devastating typhoon. You are safe, tucked away

in a well-stocked cottage in the hills, but on the

coast that your cottage overlooks, people are in

desperate need of food, sanitation, and med-

ical supplies. Relief efforts are underway, and

you can donate money to help them reach

more people. In response to this story, 68 per-

cent said that you have a moral obligation to

donate. In a different version, everything is the

same except that it isn’t you who is in the de-

veloping country, but your friend. You are at

xxiv · P r e Fa c e

home, on your computer, when your friend

contacts you, describing the situation and using

his smartphone to give you a live audiovisual

tour of the devastated area and the relief efforts,

so that you can share his experience of being

there. Again, you can help by donating, which

you can do instantly, online, with your credit

card. Note that in these two scenarios what

Greene refers to (with some justification) as

“the mess in Singer’s original hypothetical” has

been cleaned up.9 You have the same informa-

tion and the same ability to help. Other differ-

ences that exist between jumping into a pond

to save a particular, presumably local, child and

donating to an international aid organization

to save one of many foreign children in need

have also been eliminated. Yet in the second

scenario, only 34 percent said that you have a

moral obligation to help. Physical distance, it

seems, is what is making the difference.10

9 “Deep Pragmatism: A Conversation with Joshua D. Greene,” August 30, 2013, http://edge.org/conversation/deep-pragmatism.

10 Jonas Nagel and Michael Waldmann, of the University of Göttingen, in Germany, also tested for the factors that lead to the variations in responses to the drowning child and the child in poverty in a developing country, and reached a different conclusion, finding that

http://edge.org/conversation/deep-pragmatism

P r e Fa c e · xxv

Greene argues that when we think about it,

although we might make more severely negative

judgments about the character of someone who

allows a child to drown right in front of her be-

cause she is worried about having to buy a new

suit than we would about the character of

someone who does not help a child far away,

physical distance can’t really make a moral dif-

ference to what is right or wrong. What is going

on, he suggests, is that we have “inflexible auto-

matic settings” that determine our moral intui-

tions for most situations. It’s like the difference

between using automatic and manual modes

on a camera. For most situations, the point-

and-shoot mode works well enough, so why

bother with setting the focus, aperture, and

shutter speed manually? Most people don’t. In

the directness of the information, rather than the physical distance, was the primary factor. (See Nagel and Waldmann, “Deconfounding Distance Effects in Judgments of Moral Obligation,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 39 (2013): 237–52.) Greene’s research controlled for that factor and still found that distance makes a very substantial difference. Nevertheless, as Greene points out (Moral Tribes (New York: Penguin, 2013), 378, 261n), the conclusions that he draws from his research, and which I outline in the next paragraph, would hold just as well if directness of information is a significant factor in our responses.

xxvi · P r e Fa c e

moral reasoning, we also have two possible

ways of reaching decisions. We have evolved

moral intuitions that give us quick but inflexible

responses to common situations, and we have

our general capacities for reasoning that enable

us to work out solutions from scratch. Because

we evolved in small, face-to-face societies in

which a child in front of us needing help might

well be kin, or the child of someone with whom

we have an ongoing connection, we evolved an

emotional response that leads us to think that

to refuse to help a child right in front of you

would be monstrous. For virtually all of our evo-

lutionary history, however, there was no possi-

bility of even being aware of children far from

us who were in need of help, let alone of helping

them. So we never developed an emotional re-

sponse to failing to help distant strangers. To

consider that issue, we have to go into manual

mode and use our reasoning capacities to decide

what we ought to do.11

11 See Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes. The camera analogy is first presented on page 15 and more fully developed in Chapter 5.

P r e Fa c e · xxvii

On the basis of Greene’s research, it is pos-

sible to see afresh what I was doing in “Famine,

Affluence, and Morality.” I began by appealing

to our evolved “point-and-shoot” response to

saving the drowning child, and then switched

to “manual mode” to enable us to see that the

differences between that case and the situation

in which we find ourselves, with respect to dis-

tant children dying from avoidable, poverty-

related causes do not justify the judgment that

saving the drowning child is morally obligatory

whereas helping the distant children is op-

tional. As a philosophical argument, the arti-

cle requires us to use our reasoning capacities,

and from that perspective, we have to acknowl-

edge that there is no justification for having

such a strong intuitive condemnation in one

situation, and no such response in the other

one. From an evolutionary perspective, how-

ever, that’s not surprising, because the charac-

teristics that are selected for are those that

conduce to our survival and reproductive fit-

ness, and helping distant strangers does not

do that. Our capacity to reason is itself evolved,

xxviii · P r e Fa c e

of course, yet it enables us to think beyond the

limitations of our own survival and reproduc-

tion and reflect critically on the moral intu-

itions that evolution has bequeathed us.12

Thus the evolutionary explanation of our intui-

tive judgment that there is a sharp moral dif-

ference between the two situations does not

justify that intuitive judgment: on the con-

trary, it debunks it and tells us to think again.

◊

In 1971, I was concerned with a particular hu-

manitarian crisis that threatened nine million

people. Today the aim is to reduce extreme

poverty, and the more than six million pre-

mature deaths that flow from it each year.

That might seem like an insoluble problem,

and this perception is itself a major obstacle

to making progress against extreme poverty.

What is the good of rescuing a child in a pond

if more and more children are constantly

12 This argument is elaborated in Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, The Point of View of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially Chapter 7.

falling in? As Bill and Melinda Gates have

pointed out in their foreword, however, that is

not the reality of the situation. We are making

heartening progress in reducing extreme pov-

erty, and in combating diseases like measles,

malaria, and diarrhea, which are major killers

of children in developing countries. More

children are going to school, and as a result,

are having fewer children, and are better able

to care for the children they have. Interest

in overcoming extreme poverty has never

been higher. Never before have so many of

the brightest university graduates dedicated

themselves to discovering how best to over-

come it. We cannot be satisfied with what has

been achieved so far, but we can be encour-

aged by that achievement and we can reason-

ably hope to do even better in the decades

to come.

P r e Fa c e · xxix

ackno wledgments

m y greatest debt is to Renata, my wife,

with whom I first discussed whether

we ought to be sharing some of our

income with people in need. Without

her unhesitating support for that idea we

would not have begun donating to Oxfam,

and if we had not been doing that, I could not

have written “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”

Even then, I might never have written up my

thoughts on this issue had not Ronald Dworkin

encouraged me to submit an article to a new

journal that would apply philosophy to issues

of general concern. All of those involved in the

launch of Philosophy & Public Affairs can

xxxi

xxxii · a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

therefore take some of the credit for the essay

from which this book takes its title.

For the proposal to reprint the essay in book

form, I am grateful to Peter Ohlin of Oxford

University Press, and to Emily Sacharin and

Gwen Colvin for their part in the production

process. I also thank Bill and Melinda Gates

for writing the foreword.

Finally, I turn to the many people who have

made Effective Altruism an important part

of their lives. Whether or not you have read

“Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” you have

given new relevance to its central argument.

You have shown that it is possible to treat it,

not as a mere philosophical puzzle, but as a

guide to how we ought to live.

1

A s I write this, in November 1971, peo-

ple are dying in East Bengal from lack

of food, shelter, and medical care. The

suffering and death that are occurring

there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable

in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant

poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned

at least nine million people into destitute refu-

gees; nevertheless, it is not beyond the ca-

pacity of the richer nations to give enough

assistance to reduce any further suffering to

very small proportions. The decisions and

actions of human beings can prevent this kind

Famine, aFFluence, and morality

Originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972): 229–43.

2 · FA M I N E , A F F L U E N C E , A N D M O R A L I T Y

of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have

not made the necessary decisions. At the indi-

vidual level, people have, with very few excep-

tions, not responded to the situation in any

significant way. Generally speaking, people

have not given large sums to relief funds; they

have not written to their parliamentary repre-

sentatives demanding increased government

assistance; they have not demonstrated in the

streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything

else directed toward providing the refugees

with the means to satisfy their essential needs.

At the government level, no government has

given the sort of massive aid that would enable

the refugees to survive for more than a few

days. Britain, for instance, has given rather

more than most countries. It has, to date,

given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes,

Britain’s share of the nonrecoverable develop-

ment costs of the Anglo-French Concorde proj-

ect is already in excess of £275,000,000, and

on present estimates will reach £440,000,000.

The implication is that the British government

values a supersonic transport more than thirty

FA M I N E , A F F L U E N C E , A N D M O R A L I T Y · 3

times as highly as it values the lives of the nine

million refugees. Australia is another country

which, on a per capita basis, is well up in the

“aid to Bengal” table. Australia’s aid, however,

amounts to less than one-twelfth of the cost of

Sydney’s new opera house. The total amount

given, from all sources, now stands at about

£65,000,000. The estimated cost of keeping

the refugees alive for one year is £464,000,000.

Most of the refugees have now been in the

camps for more than six months. The World

Bank has said that India needs a minimum of

£300,000,000 in assistance from other coun-

tries before the end of the year. It seems obvious

that assistance on this scale will not be forth-

coming. India will be forced to choose between

letting the refugees starve or diverting funds

from her own development program, which

will mean that more of her own people will

starve in the future.1

1 There was also a third possibility: that India would go to war to enable the refugees to return to their lands. Since I wrote this essay, India has taken this way out. The situation is no longer that described above, but this does not affect my argument, as the next paragraph indicates.


These are the essential facts about the

present situation in Bengal. So far as it con-

cerns us here, there is nothing unique about

this situation except its magnitude. The Bengal

emergency is just the latest and most acute of

a series of major emergencies in various parts

of the world, arising both from natural and

from manmade causes. There are also many

parts of the world in which people die from

malnutrition and lack of food independent of

any special emergency. I take Bengal as my

example only because it is the present con-

cern, and because the size of the problem has

ensured that it has been given adequate pub-

licity. Neither individuals nor governments

can claim to be unaware of what is happening

there.

What are the moral implications of a situa-

tion like this? In what follows, I shall argue

that the way people in relatively affluent coun-

tries react to a situation like that in Bengal

cannot be justified; indeed, the whole way we

look at moral issues—our moral conceptual

scheme—needs to be altered, and with it, the


way of life that has come to be taken for

granted in our society.

In arguing for this conclusion I will not, of

course, claim to be morally neutral. I shall,

however, try to argue for the moral position

that I take, so that anyone who accepts certain

assumptions, to be made explicit, will, I hope,

accept my conclusion.

I begin with the assumption that suffering

and death from lack of food, shelter, and med-

ical care are bad. I think most people will

agree about this, although one may reach the

same view by different routes. I shall not argue

for this view. People can hold all sorts of ec-

centric positions, and perhaps from some of

them it would not follow that death by starva-

tion is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps im-

possible, to refute such positions, and so for

brevity I will henceforth take this assumption

as accepted. Those who disagree need read

no further.

My next point is this: if it is in our power to

prevent something bad from happening, without

thereby sacrificing anything of comparable


moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

By “without sacrificing anything of compa-

rable moral importance” I mean without caus-

ing anything else comparably bad to happen,

or doing something that is wrong in itself, or

failing to promote some moral good, compa-

rable in significance to the bad thing that we

can prevent. This principle seems almost as

uncontroversial as the last one. It requires us

only to prevent what is bad, and to promote

what is good, and it requires this of us only

when we can do it without sacrificing anything

that is, from the moral point of view, compa-

rably important. I could even, as far as the

application of my argument to the Bengal

emergency is concerned, qualify the point so

as to make it: if it is in our power to prevent

something very bad from happening, without

thereby sacrificing anything morally signifi-

cant, we ought, morally, to do it. An applica-

tion of this principle would be as follows: if I

am walking past a shallow pond and see a

child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and

pull the child out. This will mean getting my


clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while

the death of the child would presumably be a

very bad thing.

The uncontroversial appearance of the prin-

ciple just stated is deceptive. If it were acted

upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our

society, and our world would be fundamen-

tally changed. For the principle takes, first, no

account of proximity or distance. It makes no

moral difference whether the person I can

help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me

or a Bengali whose name I shall never know,

ten thousand miles away. Second, the princi-

ple makes no distinction between cases in which

I am the only person who could possibly do

anything and cases in which I am just one

among millions in the same position.

I do not think I need to say much in defense

of the refusal to take proximity and distance

into account. The fact that a person is physi-

cally near to us, so that we have personal con-

tact with him, may make it more likely that we

shall assist him, but this does not show that

we ought to help him rather than another who


happens to be farther away. If we accept any

principle of impartiality, universalizability,

equality, or whatever, we cannot discrimi-

nate against someone merely because he is far

away from us (or we are far away from him).

Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a better

position to judge what needs to be done to

help a person near to us than one far away,

and perhaps also to provide the assistance we

judge to be necessary. If this were the case, it

would be a reason for helping those near to us

first. This may once have been a justification

for being more concerned with the poor in

one’s town than with famine victims in India.

Unfortunately for those who like to keep their

moral responsibilities limited, instant com-

munication and swift transportation have

changed the situation. From the moral point

of view, the development of the world into a

“global village” has made an important, though

still unrecognized, difference to our moral sit-

uation. Expert observers and supervisors, sent

out by famine relief organizations or perma-

nently stationed in famine-prone areas, can


direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as

effectively as we could get it to someone in our

own block. There would seem, therefore, to be

no possible justification for discriminating on

geographical grounds.

There may be a greater need to defend the

second implication of my principle—that the

fact that there are millions of other people in

the same position, in respect to the Bengali

refugees, as I am, does not make the situation

significantly different from a situation in which

I am the only person who can prevent some-

thing very bad from occurring. Again, of course,

I admit that there is a psychological difference

between the cases; one feels less guilty about

doing nothing if one can point to others, simi-

larly placed, who have also done nothing. Yet

this can make no real difference to our moral

obligations.2 Should I consider that I am less

2 In view of the special sense philosophers often give to the term, I should say that I use “obligation” simply as the abstract noun derived from “ought,” so that “I have an obligation to” means no more, and no less, than “I ought to.” This usage is in accordance with the definition of “ought” given by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: “the general verb to express duty or obligation.” I do not think any issue of substance hangs on the way the term is used; sentences in


obliged to pull the drowning child out of the

pond if on looking around I see other people,

no farther away than I am, who have also

noticed the child but are doing nothing? One

has only to ask this question to see the ab-

surdity of the view that numbers lessen obliga-

tion. It is a view that is an ideal excuse for

inactivity; unfortunately most of the major

evils—poverty, overpopulation, pollution—are

problems in which everyone is almost equally

involved.

The view that numbers do make a differ-

ence can be made plausible if stated in this

way: if everyone in circumstances like mine

gave £5 to the Bengal Relief Fund, there

would be enough to provide food, shelter, and

medical care for the refugees; there is no reason

why I should give more than anyone else in

the same circumstances as I am; therefore I

have no obligation to give more than £5. Each

premise in this argument is true, and the argu-

which I use “obligation” could all be rewritten, although somewhat clumsily, as sentences in which a clause containing “ought” replaces the term “obligation.”


ment looks sound. It may convince us, unless

we notice that it is based on a hypothetical

premise, although the conclusion is not stated

hypothetically. The argument would be sound

if the conclusion were: if everyone in circum-

stances like mine were to give £5, I would

have no obligation to give more than £5. If the

conclusion were so stated, however, it would

be obvious that the argument has no bearing

on a situation in which it is not the case that

everyone else gives £5. This, of course, is the

actual situation. It is more or less certain that

not everyone in circumstances like mine will

give £5. So there will not be enough to provide

the needed food, shelter, and medical care.

Therefore by giving more than £5 I will prevent

more suffering than I would if I gave just £5.

It might be thought that this argument has

an absurd consequence. Since the situation

appears to be that very few people are likely to

give substantial amounts, it follows that I and

everyone else in similar circumstances ought

to give as much as possible, that is, at least up

to the point at which by giving more one would


begin to cause serious suffering for oneself

and one’s dependents—perhaps even beyond

this point to the point of marginal utility, at

which by giving more one would cause oneself

and one’s dependents as much suffering as one

would prevent in Bengal. If everyone does

this, however, there will be more than can be

used for the benefit of the refugees, and some

of the sacrifice will have been unnecessary.

Thus, if everyone does what he ought to do,

the result will not be as good as it would be if

everyone did a little less than he ought to do,

or if only some do all that they ought to do.

The paradox here arises only if we assume

that the actions in question—sending money

to the relief funds—are performed more or

less simultaneously, and are also unexpected.

For if it is to be expected that everyone is going

to contribute something, then clearly each is

not obliged to give as much as he would have

been obliged to had others not been giving too.

And if everyone is not acting more or less

simultaneously, then those giving later will

know how much more is needed, and will have


no obligation to give more than is necessary to

reach this amount. To say this is not to deny

the principle that people in the same circum-

stances have the same obligations, but to point

out that the fact that others have given, or may

be expected to give, is a relevant circumstance:

those giving after it has become known that

many others are giving and those giving before

are not in the same circumstances. So the

seemingly absurd consequence of the princi-

ple I have put forward can occur only if people

are in error about the actual circumstances—

that is, if they think they are giving when oth-

ers are not, but in fact they are giving when

others are. The result of everyone doing what

he really ought to do cannot be worse than the

result of everyone doing less than he ought to

do, although the result of everyone doing what

he reasonably believes he ought to do could be.

If my argument so far has been sound, nei-

ther our distance from a preventable evil nor

the number of other people who, in respect to

that evil, are in the same situation as we are,

lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent


that evil. I shall therefore take as established

the principle I asserted earlier. As I have al-

ready said, I need to assert it only in its qual-

ified form: if it is in our power to prevent

something very bad from happening, without

thereby sacrificing anything else morally sig-

nificant, we ought, morally, to do it.

The outcome of this argument is that our

traditional moral categories are upset. The tra-

ditional distinction between duty and charity

cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place

we normally draw it. Giving money to the

Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as an act of

charity in our society. The bodies which collect

money are known as “charities.” These organi-

zations see themselves in this way—if you send

them a check, you will be thanked for your

“generosity.” Because giving money is regarded

as an act of charity, it is not thought that there

is anything wrong with not giving. The chari-

table man may be praised, but the man who is

not charitable is not condemned. People do

not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about

spending money on new clothes or a new car


instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed,

the alternative does not occur to them.) This

way of looking at the matter cannot be justi-

fied. When we buy new clothes not to keep

ourselves warm but to look “well dressed” we

are not providing for any important need. We

would not be sacrificing anything significant if

we were to continue to wear our old clothes

and give the money to famine relief. By doing

so, we would be preventing another person

from starving. It follows from what I have said

earlier that we ought to give money away,

rather than spend it on clothes which we do

not need to keep us warm. To do so is not char-

itable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act

which philosophers and theologians have called

“supererogatory”—an act which it would be

good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the

contrary, we ought to give the money away,

and it is wrong not to do so.

I am not maintaining that there are no acts

which are charitable, or that there are no acts

which it would be good to do but not wrong

not to do. It may be possible to redraw the


distinction between duty and charity in some

other place. All I am arguing here is that the

present way of drawing the distinction, which

makes it an act of charity for a man living at

the level of affluence which most people in the

“developed nations” enjoy to give money to

save someone else from starvation, cannot be

supported. It is beyond the scope of my argu-

ment to consider whether the distinction should

be redrawn or abolished altogether. There

would be many other possible ways of drawing

the distinction—for instance, one might de-

cide that it is good to make other people as

happy as possible, but not wrong not to do so.

Despite the limited nature of the revision

in our moral conceptual scheme which I am

proposing, the revision would, given the ex-

tent of both affluence and famine in the world

today, have radical implications. These impli-

cations may lead to further objections, distinct

from those I have already considered. I shall

discuss two of these.

One objection to the position I have taken

might be simply that it is too drastic a revision


of our moral scheme. People do not ordinarily

judge in the way I have suggested they should.

Most people reserve their moral condemna-

tion for those who violate some moral norm,

such as the norm against taking another per-

son’s property. They do not condemn those

who indulge in luxury instead of giving to

famine relief. But given that I did not set out

to present a morally neutral description of the

way people make moral judgments, the way

people do in fact judge has nothing to do with

the validity of my conclusion. My conclusion

follows from the principle which I advanced

earlier, and unless that principle is rejected,

or the arguments are shown to be unsound,

I think the conclusion must stand, however

strange it appears.

It might, nevertheless, be interesting to

consider why our society, and most other soci-

eties, do judge differently from the way I have

suggested they should. In a well-known arti-

cle, J. O. Urmson suggests that the imperatives

of duty, which tell us what we must do, as dis-

tinct from what it would be good to do but not


wrong not to do, function so as to prohibit

behavior that is intolerable if men are to live

together in society.3 This may explain the origin

and continued existence of the present divi-

sion between acts of duty and acts of charity.

Moral attitudes are shaped by the needs of

society, and no doubt society needs people

who will observe the rules that make social

existence tolerable. From the point of view of

a particular society, it is essential to prevent

violations of norms against killing, stealing,

and so on. It is quite inessential, however, to

help people outside one’s own society.

If this is an explanation of our common

distinction between duty and supererogation,

however, it is not a justification of it. The

moral point of view requires us to look beyond

the interests of our own society. Previously,

as I have already mentioned, this may hardly

have been feasible, but it is quite feasible now.

3 J. O. Urmson, “Saints and Heroes,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Abraham I. Melden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 214. For a related but significantly different view see also Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Dover Press, 1907), 220–21, 492–93.


From the moral point of view, the prevention

of the starvation of millions of people outside

our society must be considered at least as

pressing as the upholding of property norms

within our society.

It has been argued by some writers, among

them Sidgwick and Urmson, that we need to

have a basic moral code which is not too far

beyond the capacities of the ordinary man, for

otherwise there will be a general breakdown

of compliance with the moral code. Crudely

stated, this argument suggests that if we tell

people that they ought to refrain from murder

and give everything they do not really need to

famine relief, they will do neither, whereas if

we tell them that they ought to refrain from

murder and that it is good to give to famine

relief but not wrong not to do so, they will at

least refrain from murder. The issue here is:

Where should we draw the line between con-

duct that is required and conduct that is good

although not required, so as to get the best

possible result? This would seem to be an em-

pirical question, although a very difficult one.


One objection to the Sidgwick-Urmson line of

argument is that it takes insufficient account

of the effect that moral standards can have

on the decisions we make. Given a society in

which a wealthy man who gives 5 percent of

his income to famine relief is regarded as most

generous, it is not surprising that a proposal

that we all ought to give away half our incomes

will be thought to be absurdly unrealistic. In a

society which held that no man should have

more than enough while others have less than

they need, such a proposal might seem nar-

row-minded. What it is possible for a man to

do and what he is likely to do are both, I think,

very greatly influenced by what people around

him are doing and expecting him to do. In any

case, the possibility that by spreading the idea

that we ought to be doing very much more

than we are to relieve famine we shall bring

about a general breakdown of moral behavior

seems remote. If the stakes are an end to wide-

spread starvation, it is worth the risk. Finally,

it should be emphasized that these consider-

ations are relevant only to the issue of what we


should require from others, and not to what

we ourselves ought to do.

The second objection to my attack on the

present distinction between duty and charity

is one which has from time to time been made

against utilitarianism. It follows from some

forms of utilitarian theory that we all ought,

morally, to be working full time to increase the

balance of happiness over misery. The position

I have taken here would not lead to this con-

clusion in all circumstances, for if there were

no bad occurrences that we could prevent

without sacrificing something of comparable

moral importance, my argument would have

no application. Given the present conditions

in many parts of the world, however, it does

follow from my argument that we ought, mor-

ally, to be working full time to relieve great

suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of

famine or other disasters. Of course, mitigat-

ing circumstances can be adduced—for in-

stance, that if we wear ourselves out through

overwork, we shall be less effective than we

would otherwise have been. Nevertheless, when


all considerations of this sort have been taken

into account, the conclusion remains: we ought

to be preventing as much suffering as we can

without sacrificing something else of compa-

rable moral importance. This conclusion is one

which we may be reluctant to face. I cannot

see, though, why it should be regarded as a

criticism of the position for which I have

argued, rather than a criticism of our ordinary

standards of behavior. Since most people are

self-interested to some degree, very few of us

are likely to do everything that we ought to do.

It would, however, hardly be honest to take

this as evidence that it is not the case that we

ought to do it.

It may still be thought that my conclusions

are so wildly out of line with what everyone

else thinks and has always thought that there

must be something wrong with the argument

somewhere. In order to show that my conclu-

sions, while certainly contrary to contempo-

rary Western moral standards, would not have

seemed so extraordinary at other times and in

other places, I would like to quote a passage


from a writer not normally thought of as a

way-out radical, Thomas Aquinas.

Now, according to the natural order insti-

tuted by divine providence, material goods

are provided for the satisfaction of human

needs. Therefore the division and appro-

priation of property, which proceeds from

human law, must not hinder the satisfac-

tion of man’s necessity from such goods.

Equally, whatever a man has in superabun-

dance is owed, of natural right, to the poor

for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says,

and it is also to be found in the Decretum

Gratiani: “The bread which you withhold

belongs to the hungry; the clothing you

shut away, to the naked; and the money

you bury in the earth is the redemption

and freedom of the penniless.”4

I now want to consider a number of points,

more practical than philosophical, which are

4 Summa Theologica, II-II, Question 66, Article 7, in Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, ed. A. P. d’Entrèves, trans. J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), 171.


relevant to the application of the moral con-

clusion we have reached. These points chal-

lenge not the idea that we ought to be doing all

we can to prevent starvation, but the idea that

giving away a great deal of money is the best

means to this end.

It is sometimes said that overseas aid should

be a government responsibility, and that there-

fore one ought not to give to privately run

charities. Giving privately, it is said, allows the

government and the noncontributing members

of society to escape their responsibilities.

This argument seems to assume that the

more people there are who give to privately or-

ganized famine relief funds, the less likely it is

that the government will take over full respon-

sibility for such aid. This assumption is un-

supported, and does not strike me as at all

plausible. The opposite view—that if no one

gives voluntarily, a government will assume

that its citizens are uninterested in famine re-

lief and would not wish to be forced into giv-

ing aid—seems more plausible. In any case,

unless there were a definite probability that by


refusing to give one would be helping to bring

about massive government assistance, people

who do refuse to make voluntary contributions

are refusing to prevent a certain amount of

suffering without being able to point to any

tangible beneficial consequence of their re-

fusal. So the onus of showing how their refusal

will bring about government action is on those

who refuse to give.

I do not, of course, want to dispute the con-

tention that governments of affluent nations

should be giving many times the amount of

genuine, no-strings-attached aid that they are

giving now. I agree, too, that giving privately

is not enough, and that we ought to be cam-

paigning actively for entirely new standards

for both public and private contributions

to famine relief. Indeed, I would sympathize

with someone who thought that campaigning

was more important than giving oneself, al-

though I doubt whether preaching what one

does not practice would be very effective.

Unfortunately, for many people the idea that

“it’s the government’s responsibility” is a reason


for not giving which does not appear to entail

any political action either.

Another, more serious reason for not giving

to famine relief funds is that until there is ef-

fective population control, relieving famine

merely postpones starvation. If we save the

Bengal refugees now, others, perhaps the chil-

dren of these refugees, will face starvation in a

few years’ time. In support of this, one may

cite the now well-known facts about the popu-

lation explosion and the relatively limited scope

for expanded production.

This point, like the previous one, is an argu-

ment against relieving suffering that is hap-

pening now, because of a belief about what

might happen in the future; it is unlike the

previous point in that very good evidence can

be adduced in support of this belief about the

future. I will not go into the evidence here.

I accept that the earth cannot support indefi-

nitely a population rising at the present rate.

This certainly poses a problem for anyone who

thinks it important to prevent famine. Again,

however, one could accept the argument without


drawing the conclusion that it absolves one

from any obligation to do anything to prevent

famine. The conclusion that should be drawn

is that the best means of preventing famine, in

the long run, is population control. It would

then follow from the position reached earlier

that one ought to be doing all one can to pro-

mote population control (unless one held that

all forms of population control were wrong in

themselves, or would have significantly bad

consequences). Since there are organizations

working specifically for population control,

one would then support them rather than

more orthodox methods of preventing famine.

A third point raised by the conclusion

reached earlier relates to the question of just

how much we all ought to be giving away. One

possibility, which has already been mentioned,

is that we ought to give until we reach the level

of marginal utility—that is, the level at which,

by giving more, I would cause as much suf-

fering to myself or my dependents as I would

relieve by my gift. This would mean, of course,

that one would reduce oneself to very near the


material circumstances of a Bengali refugee. It

will be recalled that earlier I put forward both

a strong and a moderate version of the princi-

ple of preventing bad occurrences. The strong

version, which required us to prevent bad

things from happening unless in doing so we

would be sacrificing something of comparable

moral significance, does seem to require re-

ducing ourselves to the level of marginal utility.

I should also say that the strong version seems

to me to be the correct one. I proposed the

more moderate version—that we should pre-

vent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had

to sacrifice something morally significant—

only in order to show that, even on this surely

undeniable principle, a great change in our

way of life is required. On the more moderate

principle, it may not follow that we ought

to reduce ourselves to the level of marginal

utility, for one might hold that to reduce one-

self and one’s family to this level is to cause

something significantly bad to happen. Whether

this is so I shall not discuss, since, as I have

said, I can see no good reason for holding the


moderate version of the principle rather than

the strong version. Even if we accepted the

principle only in its moderate form, however,

it should be clear that we would have to give

away enough to ensure that the consumer soci-

ety, dependent as it is on people spending on

trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would

slow down and perhaps disappear entirely.

There are several reasons why this would be

desirable in itself. The value and necessity of

economic growth are now being questioned

not only by conservationists, but by economists

as well.5 There is no doubt, too, that the con-

sumer society has had a distorting effect on

the goals and purposes of its members. Yet

looking at the matter purely from the point

of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit

to the extent to which we should deliberately

slow down our economy; for it might be the

case that if we gave away, say, 40 percent of

our Gross National Product, we would slow

5 See, for instance, John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); and E. J. Mishan, The Costs of Economic Growth (New York: Praeger, 1967).


down the economy so much that in absolute

terms we would be giving less than if we gave

25 percent of the much larger GNP that we

would have if we limited our contribution to

this smaller percentage.

I mention this only as an indication of the

sort of factor that one would have to take into

account in working out an ideal. Since Western

societies generally consider 1 percent of the

GNP an acceptable level for overseas aid, the

matter is entirely academic. Nor does it affect

the question of how much an individual should

give in a society in which very few are giving

substantial amounts.

◊

It is sometimes said, though less often now

than it used to be, that philosophers have no

special role to play in public affairs, since most

public issues depend primarily on an assess-

ment of facts. On questions of fact, it is said,

philosophers as such have no special expertise,

and so it has been possible to engage in phi-

losophy without committing oneself to any


position on major public issues. No doubt there

are some issues of social policy and foreign

policy about which it can truly be said that

a really expert assessment of the facts is re-

quired before taking sides or acting, but the

issue of famine is surely not one of these. The

facts about the existence of suffering are be-

yond dispute. Nor, I think, is it disputed that

we can do something about it, either through

orthodox methods of famine relief or through

population control or both. This is therefore

an issue on which philosophers are competent

to take a position. The issue is one which faces

everyone who has more money than he needs

to support himself and his dependents, or who

is in a position to take some sort of political

action. These categories must include practi-

cally every teacher and student of philosophy

in the universities of the Western world. If

philosophy is to deal with matters that are rel-

evant to both teachers and students, this is an

issue that philosophers should discuss.

Discussion, though, is not enough. What is

the point of relating philosophy to public (and


personal) affairs if we do not take our con-

clusions seriously? In this instance, taking our

conclusion seriously means acting upon it. The

philosopher will not find it any easier than an-

yone else to alter his attitudes and way of life

to the extent that, if I am right, is involved

in doing everything that we ought to be doing.

At the very least, though, one can make a start.

The philosopher who does so will have to sac-

rifice some of the benefits of the consumer

society, but he can find compensation in the

satisfaction of a way of life in which theory

and practice, if not yet in harmony, are at least

coming together.

33

“Not since 1940, when City College tried

to hire an atheist and advocate of free

love, Bertrand Russell, has an academic

appointment created such a commotion.”

That’s how the New York Times reported

on my move from Australia to the United

States in 1999.1 A coalition of anti-abortion

and militant disability organizations,

supported by Princeton University trust ee

Steve Forbes (at the time a candidate for

1 Sylvia Nasar, “Princeton’s New Philosopher Draws a Stir,” New York Times, April 10, 1999.

The Singer SoluTion To World PoverTy

Originally published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 17, 2006.


the Republican nomination for presi-

dent) demanded that my appointment

be rescinded. The university stood firm

on the principle of academic freedom,

and all the protests achieved was to

increase the interest in my writings. When

the New York Times Sunday Mag azine

asked me to write for them, I used the

opportunity to present an updated ver-

sion of “Famine, Affluence, and Moral ity”

to a vastly larger audience. The article

included free phone numbers readers

could call to donate to UNICEF or Oxfam

America. UNICEF and Oxfam later told

me that they had received, in the month

following the article, a total of about

$600,000 more than they usually took

in over those phone lines. Years later, an

Oxfam staff member told me, a woman

came into her office, took a crumpled

copy of the article out of her handbag,

and said she wanted to donate. She sub-

sequently became a major donor.

◊

T h E S I N g E R S O L U T I O N T O W O R L D P O v E R T Y · 35

I n the Brazilian film “Central Station,” Dora

is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends

meet by sitting at the station writing letters

for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an

opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to

do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to

follow her to an address she has been given.

(She is told he will be adopted by wealthy for-

eigners.) She delivers the boy, gets the money,

spends some of it on a television set, and set-

tles down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her

neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling

her that the boy was too old to be adopted—he

will be killed and his organs sold for trans-

plantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along,

but after her neighbor’s plain speaking, she

spends a troubled night. In the morning Dora

resolves to take the boy back.

Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that

it is a tough world, other people have nice new

TVs too, and if selling the kid is the only way

she can get one, well, he was only a street kid.

She would then have become, in the eyes of

the audience, a monster. She redeems herself


only by being prepared to bear considerable

risks to save the boy.

At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the

affluent nations of the world, people who would

have been quick to condemn Dora if she had

not rescued the boy go home to places far

more comfortable than her apartment. In fact,

the average family in the United States spends

almost one-third of its income on things that

are no more necessary to them than Dora’s

new TV was to her. Going out to nice restau-

rants, buying new clothes because the old ones

are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach

resorts—so much of our income is spent on

things not essential to the preservation of our

lives and health. Donated to one of a number

of charitable agencies, that money could mean

the difference between life and death for chil-

dren in need.

◊

All of which raises a question: In the end,

what is the ethical distinction between a

Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ


peddlers and an American who already has

a TV and upgrades to a better one—knowing

that the money could be donated to an organi-

zation that would use it to save the lives of kids

in need?

Of course, there are several differences be-

tween the two situations that could support

different moral judgments about them. For one

thing, to be able to consign a child to death

when he is standing right in front of you takes

a chilling kind of heartlessness; it is much eas-

ier to ignore an appeal for money to help chil-

dren you will never meet. Yet for a utilitarian

philosopher like myself—that is, one who judges

whether acts are right or wrong by their con-

sequences—if the upshot of the American’s

failure to donate the money is that one more

kid dies on the streets of a Brazilian city, then

it is, in some sense, just as bad as selling the

kid to the organ peddlers. But one doesn’t need

to embrace my utilitarian ethic to see that, at

the very least, there is a troubling incongruity

in being so quick to condemn Dora for taking

the child to the organ peddlers while, at the


same time, not regarding the American consum-

er’s behavior as raising a serious moral issue.

In his 1996 book, Living High and Letting

Die, the New York University philosopher Peter

Unger presented an ingenious series of imag-

inary examples designed to probe our intu-

itions about whether it is wrong to live well

without giving substantial amounts of money

to help people who are hungry, malnourished,

or dying from easily treatable illnesses like

diarrhea. Here’s my paraphrase of one of these

examples:

Bob is close to retirement. He has invested

most of his savings in a very rare and valuable

old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able

to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In

addition to the pleasure he gets from driving

and caring for his car, Bob knows that its ris-

ing market value means that he will always be

able to sell it and live comfortably after retire-

ment. One day when Bob is out for a drive, he

parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway

siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he

does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no


one aboard, is running down the railway track.

Looking farther down the track, he sees the

small figure of a child very likely to be killed by

the runaway train. He can’t stop the train and

the child is too far away to warn of the danger,

but he can throw a switch that will divert the

train down the siding where his Bugatti is

parked. Then nobody will be killed—but the

train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his

joy in owning the car and the financial security

it represents, Bob decides not to throw the

switch. The child is killed. For many years to

come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the

financial security it represents.

Bob’s conduct, most of us will immediately

respond, was gravely wrong. Unger agrees. But

then he reminds us that we, too, have oppor-

tunities to save the lives of children. We can

give to organizations like UNICEF or Oxfam

America. How much would we have to give

one of these organizations to have a high prob-

ability of saving the life of a child threatened

by easily preventable diseases? (I do not be-

lieve that children are more worth saving than


adults, but since no one can argue that chil-

dren have brought their poverty on themselves,

focusing on them simplifies the issues.) Unger

called up some experts and used the informa-

tion they provided to offer some plausible esti-

mates that include the cost of raising money,

administrative expenses, and the cost of deliv-

ering aid where it is most needed. By his calcu-

lation, $200 in donations would help a sickly

2-year-old transform into a healthy 6-year-

old—offering safe passage through childhood’s

most dangerous years. To show how practical

philosophical argument can be, Unger even tells

his readers that they can easily donate funds

by using their credit card and calling one of

these toll-free numbers: (800) 367-5437 for

UNICEF; (800) 693-2687 for Oxfam America.

Now you, too, have the information you need

to save a child’s life. How should you judge

yourself if you don’t do it? Think again about

Bob and his Bugatti. Unlike Dora, Bob did not

have to look into the eyes of the child he was

sacrificing for his own material comfort. The

child was a complete stranger to him and too


far away to relate to in an intimate, personal

way. Unlike Dora, too, he did not mislead the

child or initiate the chain of events imper-

iling him. In all these respects, Bob’s situation

resembles that of people able but unwilling to

donate to overseas aid and differs from Dora’s

situation.

If you still think that it was very wrong of

Bob not to throw the switch that would have

diverted the train and saved the child’s life,

then it is hard to see how you could deny that

it is also very wrong not to send money to one

of the organizations listed above. Unless, that

is, there is some morally important differ-

ence between the two situations that I have

overlooked.

Is it the practical uncertainties about whether

aid will really reach the people who need it?

Nobody who knows the world of overseas aid

can doubt that such uncertainties exist. But

Unger’s figure of $200 to save a child’s life

was reached after he had made conservative

assumptions about the proportion of the money

donated that will actually reach its target.


One genuine difference between Bob and

those who can afford to donate to overseas aid

organizations but don’t is that only Bob can

save the child on the tracks, whereas there

are hundreds of millions of people who can

give $200 to overseas aid organizations. The

problem is that most of them aren’t doing it.

Does this mean that it is all right for you not

to do it?

Suppose that there were more owners of

priceless vintage cars—Carol, Dave, Emma,

Fred, and so on, down to Ziggy—all in exactly

the same situation as Bob, with their own

siding and their own switch, all sacrificing the

child in order to preserve their own cherished

car. Would that make it all right for Bob to

do the same? To answer this question affirma-

tively is to endorse follow-the-crowd ethics—

the kind of ethics that led many Germans to

look away when the Nazi atrocities were being

committed. We do not excuse them because

others were behaving no better.

We seem to lack a sound basis for drawing

a clear moral line between Bob’s situation and


that of any reader of this article with $200 to

spare who does not donate it to an overseas

aid agency. These readers seem to be acting at

least as badly as Bob was acting when he chose

to let the runaway train hurtle toward the un-

suspecting child. In the light of this conclu-

sion, I trust that many readers will reach for

the phone and donate that $200. Perhaps you

should do it before reading further.

◊

Now that you have distinguished yourself mor-

ally from people who put their vintage cars

ahead of a child’s life, how about treating your-

self and your partner to dinner at your favorite

restaurant? But wait. The money you will

spend at the restaurant could also help save

the lives of children overseas! True, you weren’t

planning to blow $200 tonight, but if you were

to give up dining out just for one month, you

would easily save that amount. And what is

one month’s dining out, compared to a child’s

life? There’s the rub. Since there are a lot of

desperately needy children in the world, there


will always be another child whose life you

could save for another $200. Are you therefore

obliged to keep giving until you have nothing

left? At what point can you stop?

Hypothetical examples can easily become

farcical. Consider Bob. How far past losing the

Bugatti should he go? Imagine that Bob had

got his foot stuck in the track of the siding, and

if he diverted the train, then before it rammed

the car it would also amputate his big toe.

Should he still throw the switch? What if it

would amputate his foot? His entire leg?

As absurd as the Bugatti scenario gets

when pushed to extremes, the point it raises is

a serious one: only when the sacrifices become

very significant indeed would most people be

prepared to say that Bob does nothing wrong

when he decides not to throw the switch. Of

course, most people could be wrong; we can’t

decide moral issues by taking opinion polls.

But consider for yourself the level of sacrifice

that you would demand of Bob, and then think

about how much money you would have to

give away in order to make a sacrifice that


is roughly equal to that. It’s almost certainly

much, much more than $200. For most middle-

class Ameri cans, it could easily be more like

$200,000.

Isn’t it counterproductive to ask people to

do so much? Don’t we run the risk that many

will shrug their shoulders and say that mo-

rality, so conceived, is fine for saints but not

for them? I accept that we are unlikely to see,

in the near or even medium-term future, a

world in which it is normal for wealthy Ameri-

cans to give the bulk of their wealth to strang-

ers. When it comes to praising or blaming

people for what they do, we tend to use a stan-

dard that is relative to some conception of

normal behavior. Comfortably off Americans

who give, say, 10 percent of their income to

overseas aid organizations are so far ahead

of most of their equally comfortable fellow

citizens that I wouldn’t go out of my way to

chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless,

they should be doing much more, and they are

in no position to criticize Bob for failing to

make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.


At this point various objections may crop

up. Someone may say: “If every citizen living

in the affluent nations contributed his or her

share I wouldn’t have to make such a drastic

sacrifice, because long before such levels were

reached, the resources would have been there

to save the lives of all those children dying from

lack of food or medical care. So why should

I give more than my fair share?” Another, re-

lated, objection is that the Government ought

to increase its overseas aid allocations, since

that would spread the burden more equitably

across all taxpayers.

Yet the question of how much we ought to

give is a matter to be decided in the real world—

and that, sadly, is a world in which we know

that most people do not, and in the immediate

future will not, give substantial amounts to

overseas aid agencies. We know, too, that at

least in the next year, the United States Govern-

ment is not going to meet even the very mod-

est United Nations–recommended target of .7

percent of gross national product; at the mo-

ment it lags far below that, at .09 percent, not


even half of Japan’s .22 percent or a tenth of

Denmark’s .97 percent. Thus, we know that

the money we can give beyond that theoretical

“fair share” is still going to save lives that

would otherwise be lost. While the idea that

no one need do more than his or her fair share

is a powerful one, should it prevail if we know

that others are not doing their fair share

and that children will die preventable deaths

unless we do more than our fair share? That

would be taking fairness too far.

Thus, this ground for limiting how much

we ought to give also fails. In the world as it is

now, I can see no escape from the conclusion

that each one of us with wealth surplus to his

or her essential needs should be giving most

of it to help people suffering from poverty so

dire as to be life-threatening. That’s right:

I’m saying that you shouldn’t buy that new car,

take that cruise, redecorate the house, or get

that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit

could save five children’s lives.

So how does my philosophy break down in

dollars and cents? An American household


with an income of $50,000 spends around

$30,000 annually on necessities, according

to the Conference Board, a nonprofit economic

research organization. Therefore, for a household

bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help

the world’s poor should be as close as possible

to $20,000. The $30,000 required for neces-

sities holds for higher incomes as well. So a

household making $100,000 could cut a yearly

check for $70,000. Again, the formula is sim-

ple: whatever money you’re spending on luxu-

ries, not necessities, should be given away.

Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that

human nature just isn’t sufficiently altruistic

to make it plausible that many people will sac-

rifice so much for strangers. On the facts of

human nature, they might be right, but they

would be wrong to draw a moral conclusion

from those facts. If it is the case that we ought

to do things that, predictably, most of us won’t

do, then let’s face that fact head-on. Then, if

we value the life of a child more than going to

fancy restaurants, the next time we dine out

we will know that we could have done some-


thing better with our money. If that makes

living a morally decent life extremely arduous,

well, then that is the way things are. If we

don’t do it, then we should at least know that

we are failing to live a morally decent life—not

because it is good to wallow in guilt but be-

cause knowing where we should be going is

the first step toward heading in that direction.

When Bob first grasped the dilemma that

faced him as he stood by that railway switch,

he must have thought how extraordinarily

unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in

which he must choose between the life of an

innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his

savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are

all in that situation.

51

In 2006, two major news stories focused

attention on the philanthropy of billion-

aires. Bill Gates announced that he would

phase out his executive role at Microsoft,

and spend more time working with the Bill

and Melinda Gates Founda tion, already by

far the largest charitable foundation in the

world, thanks to gifts from Bill and Melinda.

then warren Buffett announced that he

planned to give away most of his $44 billion

fortune, including a gift of $31 billion to

the Gates Foun dation. Ilena Silverman, an

What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?

Originally published in The New York Times SundayMagazine, December 17, 2006.


editor at the New York Times Sunday

Magazine, asked me to write about some

of the ethical questions raised by these

massive donations from super-rich indi-

viduals. I agreed, but I didn’t want to limit

the article’s scope to what billionaires

should do. It appeared just when most

U.S. donors are finalizing their chari-

table giving, before the tax year ends on

December 31.

◊

W hat is a human life worth? You

may not want to put a price tag on

it. But if we really had to, most of

us would agree that the value of a

human life would be in the millions. Consistent

with the foundations of our democracy and our

frequently professed belief in the inherent dig

nity of human beings, we would also agree that

all humans are created equal, at least to the

extent of denying that differences of sex, eth

nicity, nationality, and place of residence change

the value of a human life.

WhAT ShOULD A BILLIONAIRE GIvE—AND WhAT ShOULD YOU? · 53

With Christmas approaching, and Ameri

cans writing checks to their favorite charities,

it’s a good time to ask how these two beliefs—

that a human life, if it can be priced at all, is

worth millions, and that the factors I have

mentioned do not alter the value of a human

life—square with our actions. Perhaps this year

such questions lurk beneath the surface of

more family discussions than usual, for it has

been an extraordinary year for philanthropy,

especially philanthropy to fight global poverty.

For Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft,

the ideal of valuing all human life equally

began to jar against reality some years ago,

when he read an article about diseases in the

developing world and came across the sta

tistic that half a million children die every

year from rotavirus, the most common cause

of severe diarrhea in children. He had never

heard of rotavirus. “How could I never have

heard of something that kills half a million

children every year?” he asked himself. He

then learned that in developing countries,

millions of children die from diseases that


have been eliminated, or virtually eliminated,

in the United States. That shocked him be

cause he assumed that, if there are vaccines

and treatments that could save lives, govern

ments would be doing everything possible to

get them to the people who need them. As

Gates told a meeting of the World Health

Assembly in Geneva last year, he and his wife,

Melinda, “couldn’t escape the brutal conclu

sion that—in our world today—some lives are

seen as worth saving and others are not.” They

said to themselves, “This can’t be true.” But

they knew it was.

Gates’s speech to the World Health Assembly

concluded on an optimistic note, looking

forward to the next decade when “people will

finally accept that the death of a child in the

developing world is just as tragic as the death

of a child in the developed world.” That belief

in the equal value of all human life is also

prominent on the Web site of the Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation, where under Our

Values we read: “All lives—no matter where

they are being led—have equal value.”


We are very far from acting in accordance

with that belief. In the same world in which

more than a billion people live at a level of

affluence never previously known, roughly a

billion other people struggle to survive on the

purchasing power equivalent of less than one

U.S. dollar per day. Most of the world’s poorest

people are undernourished, lack access to safe

drinking water or even the most basic health

services, and cannot send their children to

school. According to UNICEF, more than 10

million children die every year—about 30,000

per day—from avoidable, povertyrelated

causes.

Last June the investor Warren Buffett took

a significant step toward reducing those deaths

when he pledged $31 billion to the Gates

Foundation, and another $6 billion to other

charitable foundations. Buffett’s pledge, set

alongside the nearly $30 billion given by Bill

and Melinda Gates to their foundation, has

made it clear that the first decade of the 21st

century is a new “golden age of philanthropy.”

On an inflationadjusted basis, Buffett has


pledged to give more than double the lifetime

total given away by two of the philanthropic

giants of the past, Andrew Carnegie and John

D. Rockefeller, put together. Bill and Melinda

Gates’s gifts are not far behind.

The Gates’ and Buffett’s donations will now

be put to work primarily to reduce poverty,

disease, and premature death in the devel

oping world. According to the Global Forum

for Health Research, less than 10 percent of

the world’s health research budget is spent

on combating conditions that account for 90

percent of the global burden of disease. In the

past, diseases that affect only the poor have

been of no commercial interest to pharmaceu

tical manufacturers, because the poor cannot

afford to buy their products. The Global Alliance

for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), heavily

supported by the Gates Foundation, seeks to

change this by guaranteeing to purchase mil

lions of doses of vaccines, when they are devel

oped, that can prevent diseases like malaria.

GAVI has also assisted developing countries to

immunize more people with existing vaccines:

WhAT ShOULD A BILL IONAIRE GIvE—AND WhAT ShOULD YOU? · 57

99 million additional children have been reached

to date. By doing this, GAVI claims to have al

ready averted nearly 1.7 million future deaths.

Philanthropy on this scale raises many eth

ical questions: Why are the people who are

giving doing so? Does it do any good? Should

we praise them for giving so much or criticize

them for not giving still more? Is it troubling

that such momentous decisions are made by a

few extremely wealthy individuals? And how

do our judgments about them reflect on our

own way of living?

Let’s start with the question of motives. The

rich must—or so some of us with less money

like to assume—suffer sleepless nights because

of their ruthlessness in squeezing out com

petitors, firing workers, shutting down plants,

or whatever else they have to do to acquire

their wealth. When wealthy people give away

money, we can always say that they are doing

it to ease their consciences or generate favor

able publicity. It has been suggested—by, for

example, David Kirkpatrick, a senior editor at

Fortune magazine—that Bill Gates’s turn to


philanthropy was linked to the antitrust prob

lems Microsoft had in the U.S. and the European

Union. Was Gates, consciously or subcon

sciously, trying to improve his own image and

that of his company?

This kind of sniping tells us more about

the attackers than the attacked. Giving away

large sums, rather than spending the money

on corporate advertising or developing new

products, is not a sensible strategy for increas

ing personal wealth. When we read that

someone has given away a lot of their money,

or time, to help others, it challenges us to

think about our own behavior. Should we be

following their example, in our own modest

way? But if the rich just give their money away

to improve their image, or to make up for past

misdeeds—misdeeds quite unlike any we have

committed, of course—then, conveniently, what

they are doing has no relevance to what we

ought to do.

A famous story is told about Thomas Hobbes,

the 17thcentury English philosopher, who

argued that we all act in our own interests. On


seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked

Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ

had not commanded us to do so. Yes, Hobbes

replied, he was in pain to see the miserable

condition of the old man, and his gift, by pro

viding the man with some relief from that

misery, also eased Hobbes’s pain. That reply

reconciles Hobbes’s charity with his egoistic

theory of human motivation, but at the cost

of emptying egoism of much of its bite. If ego

ists suffer when they see a stranger in distress,

they are capable of being as charitable as any

altruist.

Followers of the 18thcentury German

philosopher Immanuel Kant would disagree.

They think an act has moral worth only if it is

done out of a sense of duty. Doing something

merely because you enjoy doing it, or enjoy

seeing its consequences, they say, has no moral

worth, because if you happened not to enjoy

doing it, then you wouldn’t do it, and you are

not responsible for your likes and dislikes,

whereas you are responsible for your obedi

ence to the demands of duty.


Perhaps some philanthropists are moti

vated by their sense of duty. Apart from the

equal value of all human life, the other “simple

value” that lies at the core of the work of the

Gates Foundation, according to its Web site, is

“To whom much has been given, much is ex

pected.” That suggests the view that those who

have great wealth have a duty to use it for a

larger purpose than their own interests. But

while such questions of motive may be rele

vant to our assessment of Gates’s or Buffett’s

character, they pale into insignificance when

we consider the effect of what Gates and

Buffett are doing. The parents whose children

could die from rotavirus care more about get

ting the help that will save their children’s lives

than about the motivations of those who make

that possible.

Interestingly, neither Gates nor Buffett seems

motivated by the possibility of being rewarded

in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates

told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more

I could be doing on a Sunday morning” than

going to church. Put them together with


Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking,

and three of the four greatest American phi

lanthropists have been atheists or agnostics.

(The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a

country in which 96 percent of the population

say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a

striking fact. It means that in one sense, Gates

and Buffett are probably less selfinterested in

their charity than someone like Mother Teresa,

who as a pious Roman Catholic believed in re

ward and punishment in the afterlife.

More important than questions about

motives are questions about whether there

is an obligation for the rich to give, and if so,

how much they should give. A few years ago,

an AfricanAmerican cabdriver taking me to

the InterAmerican Development Bank in

Washington asked me if I worked at the bank.

I told him I did not but was speaking at a

conference on development and aid. He then

assumed that I was an economist, but when

I said no, my training was in philosophy, he

asked me if I thought the U.S. should give for

eign aid. When I answered affirmatively, he


replied that the government shouldn’t tax

people in order to give their money to others.

That, he thought, was robbery. When I asked

if he believed that the rich should voluntarily

donate some of what they earn to the poor, he

said that if someone had worked for his money,

he wasn’t going to tell him what to do with it.

At that point we reached our destination.

Had the journey continued, I might have tried

to persuade him that people can earn large

amounts only when they live under favorable

social circumstances, and that they don’t create

those circumstances by themselves. I could

have quoted Warren Buffett’s acknowledg

ment that society is responsible for much of

his wealth. “If you stick me down in the mid

dle of Bangladesh or Peru,” he said, “you’ll find

out how much this talent is going to produce

in the wrong kind of soil.” The Nobel Prize–

winning economist and social scientist Herbert

Simon estimated that “social capital” is respon

sible for at least 90 percent of what people

earn in wealthy societies like those of the

United States or northwestern Europe. By


social capital Simon meant not only natural

resources but, more important, the technology

and organizational skills in the community,

and the presence of good government. These

are the foundation on which the rich can begin

their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added,

“we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 per

cent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so

steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of dis

incentive effects. But his estimate does under

mine the argument that the rich are entitled to

keep their wealth because it is all a result of

their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true

of at most 10 percent of it.

In any case, even if we were to grant that

people deserve every dollar they earn, that

doesn’t answer the question of what they

should do with it. We might say that they have

a right to spend it on lavish parties, private

jets, and luxury yachts, or, for that matter, to

flush it down the toilet. But we could still

think that for them to do these things while

others die from easily preventable diseases is

wrong. In an article I wrote more than three


decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian

emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used

the example of walking by a shallow pond and

seeing a small child who has fallen in and

appears to be in danger of drowning. Even

though we did nothing to cause the child to

fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that

if we can save the child at minimal inconven

ience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do

so. Anything else would be callous, indecent,

and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in res

cuing the child we may, for example, ruin a

new pair of shoes is not a good reason for

allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for

the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to

a health program in a developing country that

stands a good chance of saving the life of a

child, we ought to do so.

Perhaps, though, our obligation to help the

poor is even stronger than this example implies,

for we are less innocent than the passerby

who did nothing to cause the child to fall into

the pond. Thomas Pogge, a philosopher at

Columbia University, has argued that at least


some of our affluence comes at the expense of

the poor. He bases this claim not simply on the

usual critique of the barriers that Europe and

the United States maintain against agricul

tural imports from developing countries but

also on less familiar aspects of our trade with

developing countries. For example, he points

out that international corporations are willing

to make deals to buy natural resources from

any government, no matter how it has come to

power. This provides a huge financial incen

tive for groups to try to overthrow the existing

government. Successful rebels are rewarded

by being able to sell off the nation’s oil, miner

als, or timber.

In their dealings with corrupt dictators in

developing countries, Pogge asserts, interna

tional corporations are morally no better than

someone who knowingly buys stolen goods—

with the difference that the international legal

and political order recognizes the corpora

tions, not as criminals in possession of stolen

goods but as the legal owners of the goods they

have bought. This situation is, of course, bene


ficial for the industrial nations, because it

enables us to obtain the raw materials we need

to maintain our prosperity, but it is a disaster

for resourcerich developing countries, turning

the wealth that should benefit them into a

curse that leads to a cycle of coups, civil wars,

and corruption and is of little benefit to the

people as a whole.

In this light, our obligation to the poor is

not just one of providing assistance to strang

ers but one of compensation for harms that

we have caused and are still causing them. It

might be argued that we do not owe the poor

compensation, because our affluence actually

benefits them. Living luxuriously, it is said,

provides employment, and so wealth trickles

down, helping the poor more effectively than

aid does. But the rich in industrialized nations

buy virtually nothing that is made by the very

poor. During the past 20 years of economic

globalization, although expanding trade has

helped lift many of the world’s poor out of pov

erty, it has failed to benefit the poorest 10 per

cent of the world’s population. Some of the


extremely poor, most of whom live in sub

Saharan Africa, have nothing to sell that rich

people want, while others lack the infrastruc

ture to get their goods to market. If they can

get their crops to a port, European and U.S.

subsidies often mean that they cannot sell

them, despite—as for example in the case of

West African cotton growers who compete

with vastly larger and richer U.S. cotton pro

ducers—having a lower production cost than

the subsidized producers in the rich nations.

The remedy to these problems, it might

reasonably be suggested, should come from

the state, not from private philanthropy. When

aid comes through the government, everyone

who earns above the taxfree threshold con

tributes something, with more collected from

those with greater ability to pay. Much as we

may applaud what Gates and Buffett are doing,

we can also be troubled by a system that leaves

the fate of hundreds of millions of people

hanging on the decisions of two or three pri

vate citizens. But the amount of foreign devel

opment aid given by the U.S. government is,


at 22 cents for every $100 the nation earns,

about the same, as a percentage of gross

national income, as Portugal gives and about

half that of the U.K. Worse still, much of it

is directed where it best suits U.S. strategic

interests—Iraq is now by far the largest re

cipient of U.S. development aid, and Egypt,

Jordan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan all rank

in the Top 10. Less than a quarter of official

U.S. development aid—barely a nickel in every

$100 of our G.N.I.—goes to the world’s poor

est nations.

Adding private philanthropy to U.S. gov

ernment aid improves this picture, because

Americans privately give more per capita to

international philanthropic causes than the

citizens of almost any other nation. Even when

private donations are included, however, coun

tries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the

Netherlands give three or four times as much

foreign aid, in proportion to the size of their

economies, as the U.S. gives—with a much

larger percentage going to the poorest nations.

At least as things now stand, the case for phil


anthropic efforts to relieve global poverty is

not susceptible to the argument that the gov

ernment has taken care of the problem. And

even if official U.S. aid were betterdirected

and comparable, relative to our gross domestic

product, with that of the most generous nations,

there would still be a role for private philan

thropy. Unconstrained by diplomatic consid

erations or the desire to swing votes at the

United Nations, private donors can more easily

avoid dealing with corrupt or wasteful gov

ernments. They can go directly into the field,

working with local villages and grassroots

organizations.

Nor are philanthropists beholden to lobby

ists. As the New York Times reported recently,

billions of dollars of U.S. aid is tied to domestic

goods. Wheat for Africa must be grown in

America, although aid experts say this often

depresses local African markets, reducing the

incentive for farmers there to produce more.

In a decision that surely costs lives, hundreds

of millions of condoms intended to stop the

spread of AIDS in Africa and around the world


must be manufactured in the U.S., although

they cost twice as much as similar products

made in Asia.

In other ways, too, private philanthropists

are free to venture where governments fear

to tread. Through a foundation named for his

wife, Susan Thompson Buffett, Warren Buffett

has supported reproductive rights, including

family planning and prochoice organizations.

In another unusual initiative, he has pledged

$50 million for the International Atomic

Energy Agency’s plan to establish a “fuel bank”

to supply nuclearreactor fuel to countries

that meet their nuclearnonproliferation com

mitments. The idea, which has been talked

about for many years, is widely agreed to be

a useful step toward discouraging countries

from building their own facilities for produc

ing nuclear fuel, which could then be diverted

to weapons production. It is, Buffett said, “an

investment in a safer world.” Though it is

something that governments could and

should be doing, no government had taken the

first step.


Aid has always had its critics. Carefully

planned and intelligently directed private phi

lanthropy may be the best answer to the claim

that aid doesn’t work. Of course, as in any

largescale human enterprise, some aid can be

ineffective. But provided that aid isn’t actually

counterproductive, even relatively inefficient

assistance is likely to do more to advance

human wellbeing than luxury spending by

the wealthy.

◊

The rich, then, should give. But how much

should they give? Gates may have given away

nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sit

ting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest

Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000 square

foot hightech lakeside estate near Seattle is

reportedly worth more than $100 million.

Property taxes are about $1 million. Among

his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only

handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still

in private hands, for which he paid $30.8 mil

lion in 1994. Has Bill Gates done enough?


More pointedly, you might ask: if he really

believes that all lives have equal value, what is

he doing living in such an expensive house and

owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more

lives that could be saved by living more mod

estly and adding the money thus saved to the

amount he has already given?

Yet we should recognize that, if judged by

the proportion of his wealth that he has

given away, Gates compares very well with

most of the other people on the Forbes 400

list, including his former colleague and

Microsoft cofounder, Paul Allen. Allen, who

left the company in 1983, has given, over his

lifetime, more than $800 million to philan

thropic causes. That is far more than nearly

any of us will ever be able to give. But Forbes

lists Allen as the fifthrichest American, with

a net worth of $16 billion. He owns the

Seattle Seahawks, the Portland Trailblazers,

and a 413foot oceangoing yacht that carries

two helicopters and a 60foot submarine.

He has given only about 5 percent of his total

wealth.


Is there a line of moral adequacy that falls

between the 5 percent that Allen has given away

and the roughly 35 percent that Gates has

donated? Few people have set a personal ex

ample that would allow them to tell Gates that

he has not given enough, but one who could is

Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was

in his mid40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of

his $45 million real estate fortune to health

related charities, retaining only his modest

family home in Jenkintown, near Philadel

phia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary

expenses. After learning that thousands of peo

ple with failing kidneys die each year while

waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadel

phia hospital and donated one of his kidneys

to a complete stranger.

After reading about Kravinsky in the New

Yorker, I invited him to speak to my classes at

Princeton. He comes across as anguished by

the failure of others to see the simple logic that

lies behind his altruism. Kravinsky has a

mathematical mind—a talent that obviously

helped him in deciding what investments


would prove profitable—and he says that the

chances of dying as a result of donating a

kidney are about 1 in 4,000. For him this implies

that to withhold a kidney from someone who

would otherwise die means valuing one’s own

life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio

Kravinsky considers “obscene.”

What marks Kravinsky from the rest of us

is that he takes the equal value of all human

life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of

rhetoric. He acknowledges that some people

think he is crazy, and even his wife says she

believes that he goes too far. One of her argu

ments against the kidney donation was that

one of their children may one day need a

kidney, and Zell could be the only compatible

donor. Kravinsky’s love for his children is, as

far as I can tell, as strong as that of any normal

parent. Such attachments are part of our

nature, no doubt the product of our evolution

as mammals who give birth to children, who

for an unusually long time require our assis

tance in order to survive. But that does not, in

Kravinsky’s view, justify our placing a value on


the lives of our children that is thousands of

times greater than the value we place on the

lives of the children of strangers. Asked if he

would allow his child to die if it would enable

a thousand children to live, Kravinsky said

yes. Indeed, he has said he would permit his

child to die even if this enabled only two other

children to live. Nevertheless, to appease his

wife, he recently went back into real estate,

made some money, and bought the family a

larger home. But he still remains committed

to giving away as much as possible, subject

only to keeping his domestic life reasonably

tranquil.

Buffett says he believes in giving his chil

dren “enough so they feel they could do any

thing, but not so much that they could do

nothing.” That means, in his judgment, “a few

hundred thousand” each. In absolute terms,

that is far more than most Americans are able

to leave their children and, by Kravinsky’s

standard, certainly too much. (Kravinsky says

that the hard part is not giving away the first

$45 million but the last $10,000, when you


have to live so cheaply that you can’t function

in the business world.) But even if Buffett left

each of his three children a million dollars

each, he would still have given away more

than 99.99 percent of his wealth. When

someone does that much—especially in a soci

ety in which the norm is to leave most of your

wealth to your children—it is better to praise

them than to cavil about the extra few hun

dred thousand dollars they might have given.

Philosophers like Liam Murphy of New York

University and my colleague Kwame Anthony

Appiah at Princeton contend that our obliga

tions are limited to carrying our fair share of

the burden of relieving global poverty. They

would have us calculate how much would be

required to ensure that the world’s poorest

people have a chance at a decent life, and then

divide this sum among the affluent. That would

give us each an amount to donate, and having

given that, we would have fulfilled our obliga

tions to the poor.

What might that fair amount be? One way

of calculating it would be to take as our target,


at least for the next nine years, the Millennium

Development Goals, set by the United Nations

Millennium Summit in 2000. On that occa

sion, the largest gathering of world leaders in

history jointly pledged to meet, by 2015, a list

of goals that include:

Reducing by half the proportion of the

world’s people in extreme poverty (defined

as living on less than the purchasing

power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per

day).

Reducing by half the proportion of people

who suffer from hunger.

Ensuring that children everywhere are

able to take a full course of primary

schooling.

Ending sex disparity in education.

Reducing by twothirds the mortality rate

among children under 5.

Reducing by threequarters the rate of

maternal mortality.


Halting and beginning to reverse the

spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and

beginning to reduce the incidence of

malaria and other major diseases.

Reducing by half the proportion of people

without sustainable access to safe drinking

water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by

the Columbia University economist Jeffrey

Sachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting

these goals to be $121 billion in 2006, rising to

$189 billion by 2015. When we take account of

existing official development aid promises, the

additional amount needed each year to meet

the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74

billion for 2015.

Now let’s look at the incomes of America’s

rich and superrich, and ask how much they

could reasonably give. The task is made easier

by statistics recently provided by Thomas

Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, economists at

the École Normale Supérieure, ParisJourdan,

and the University of California, Berkeley,


respectively, based on U.S. tax data for 2004.

Their figures are for pretax income, excluding

income from capital gains, which for the very

rich are nearly always substantial. For sim

plicity I have rounded the figures, generally

downward. Note too that the numbers refer

to “tax units,” that is, in many cases, families

rather than individuals.

Piketty and Saez’s top bracket comprises

.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers. There are 14,400

of them, earning an average of $12,775,000,

with total earnings of $184 billion. The min

imum annual income in this group is more

than $5 million, so it seems reasonable to sup

pose that they could, without much hardship,

give away a third of their annual income, an

average of $4.3 million each, for a total of

around $61 billion. That would still leave each

of them with an annual income of at least $3.3

million.

Next comes the rest of the top .1 percent

(excluding the category just described, as I

shall do henceforth). There are 129,600 in this

group, with an average income of just over $2


million and a minimum income of $1.1 mil

lion. If they were each to give a quarter of their

income, that would yield about $65 billion,

and leave each of them with at least $846,000

annually.

The top .5 percent consists of 575,900 tax

payers, with an average income of $623,000

and a minimum of $407,000. If they were to

give onefifth of their income, they would still

have at least $325,000 each, and they would

be giving a total of $72 billion.

Coming down to the level of those in the

top 1 percent, we find 719,900 taxpayers with

an average income of $327,000 and a min

imum of $276,000. They could comfortably

afford to give 15 percent of their income. That

would yield $35 billion and leave them with at

least $234,000.

Finally, the remainder of the nation’s top 10

percent earn at least $92,000 annually, with

an average of $132,000. There are nearly 13

million in this group. If they gave the tradi

tional tithe—10 percent of their income, or

an average of $13,200 each—this would yield


about $171 billion and leave them a minimum

of $83,000.

You could spend a long time debating

whether the fractions of income I have sug

gested for donation constitute the fairest pos

sible scheme. Perhaps the sliding scale should

be steeper, so that the superrich give more and

the merely comfortable give less. And it could

be extended beyond the Top 10 percent of

American families, so that everyone able to

afford more than the basic necessities of life

gives something, even if it is as little as 1 per

cent. Be that as it may, the remarkable thing

about these calculations is that a scale of

donations that is unlikely to impose signifi

cant hardship on anyone yields a total of

$404 billion—from just 10 percent of American

families.

Obviously, the rich in other nations should

share the burden of relieving global poverty.

The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the

gross domestic product of all Organization

for Economic Cooperation and Development

nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer


than all other major nations, and its wealth is

more unevenly distributed than wealth in al

most any other industrialized country, the rich

in the U.S. should contribute more than 36

percent of total global donations. So some

what more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve

global poverty should come from the U.S. For

simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the

U.S. On that basis, extending the scheme I have

suggested worldwide would provide $808 bil

lion annually for development aid. That’s more

than six times what the task force chaired by

Sachs estimated would be required for 2006

in order to be on track to meet the Millennium

Development Goals, and more than 16 times

the shortfall between that sum and existing

official development aid commitments.

If we are obliged to do no more than our

fair share of eliminating global poverty, the

burden will not be great. But is that really all

we ought to do? Since we all agree that fair

ness is a good thing, and none of us like doing

more because others don’t pull their weight,

the fairshare view is attractive. In the end,


however, I think we should reject it. Let’s re

turn to the drowning child in the shallow

pond. Imagine it is not 1 small child who has

fallen in, but 50 children. We are among 50

adults, unrelated to the children, picnicking

on the lawn around the pond. We can easily

wade into the pond and rescue the children,

and the fact that we would find it cold and un

pleasant sloshing around in the kneedeep

muddy water is no justification for failing to

do so. The “fair share” theorists would say that

if we each rescue one child, all the children

will be saved, and so none of us have an obliga

tion to save more than one. But what if half the

picnickers prefer staying clean and dry to res

cuing any children at all? Is it acceptable if the

rest of us stop after we have rescued just one

child, knowing that we have done our fair

share, but that half the children will drown?

We might justifiably be furious with those who

are not doing their fair share, but our anger

with them is not a reason for letting the chil

dren die. In terms of praise and blame, we are

clearly right to condemn, in the strongest


terms, those who do nothing. In contrast, we

may withhold such condemnation from those

who stop when they have done their fair share.

Even so, they have let children drown when

they could easily have saved them, and that

is wrong.

Similarly, in the real world, it should be

seen as a serious moral failure when those

with ample income do not do their fair share

toward relieving global poverty. It isn’t so easy,

however, to decide on the proper approach to

take to those who limit their contribution to

their fair share when they could easily do more

and when, because others are not playing their

part, a further donation would assist many

in desperate need. In the privacy of our own

judgment, we should believe that it is wrong

not to do more. But whether we should actu

ally criticize people who are doing their fair

share, but no more than that, depends on the

psychological impact that such criticism will

have on them, and on others. This in turn may

depend on social practices. If the majority are

doing little or nothing, setting a standard


higher than the fairshare level may seem so

demanding that it discourages people who

are willing to make an equitable contribution

from doing even that. So it may be best to re

frain from criticizing those who achieve the

fairshare level. In moving our society’s stan

dards forward, we may have to progress one

step at a time.

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading,

writing, and teaching about the ethical issue

posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of

great abundance and lifethreatening poverty.

Yet it was not until, in preparing this essay,

I calculated how much America’s Top 10 per

cent of income earners actually make that

I fully understood how easy it would be for the

world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate,

global poverty. (It has actually become much

easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have

grown significantly richer.) I found the result

astonishing. I doublechecked the figures and

asked a research assistant to check them as

well. But they were right. Measured against

our capacity, the Millennium Development


Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we

fail to achieve them—as on present indica

tions we well might—we have no excuses. The

target we should be setting for ourselves is

not halving the proportion of people living

in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat,

but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one,

needs to live in such degrading conditions.

That is a worthy goal, and it is well within

our reach.

famine, affluence, and morality · affluence, and morality.” the propor-tion of the world’s...

Documents